We had a get-together at the Town Hall to turn our ornaments we were donating to the Rochester Woodcarver’s entry in the Festival of Trees benefit for Hiawatha Homes this year.
It all started with a pile of blanks… Gnome ‘seeds’, both the hat and the body in one blank. Some folks separated the hat and reattached with the longer blanks for more control over the design, others turned the hat and the gnome in one piece.
Some examples were turned to get the creative juices flowing giving everyone an idea of how they might approach the project.
With the 3 club lathes and one other ‘midi’ lathe spinning the little gnome village quickly grew.
One lathe was dedicated to ‘noses’ later in production but with 9 of us there we kept all the lathes spinning.
It was interesting to see the various ‘hats’ people chose for their gnome. We had bowler hats, top hats as well as the traditional tall pointed gnome hats with a ball at the end.
Pointed noses, carrot-like noses and big round noses became popular as turners saw what looked best ‘poking through the hair’ after finishing a gnome.
If we ever do this again we would probably purchase a variety of hair colors and hair lengths for the gnomes.
In the end we had 29 gnomes in our little village which was a pretty diverse little crowd.
By: Todd VanDeWalker On: 11/12/2022